The Weeked Comes, The Cycle Hums

The paradox of class at the millennium, in sum, must be understood in these terms. Neoliberalism aspires, in its ideology and practice, to intensify the abstractions inherent in capitalism itself: to separate labor power from its human context, to replace society with the market, to build a universe out of aggregated transactions. While it can never fully succeed, its advance over the "long" twentieth century has profoundly altered, if unevenly in space and time, the phenomenology of being in the world. Formative experiences - like the nature of work and the reproduction of self, culture and community - have shifted. Once-legibile processes - the workings of power, the distribution of wealth, the meaning of politics and national belonging - have become opaque, even spectral. The contours of "society" blur, its organic solidarity disperses. Out of its shadows emerges a more radically individuated sense of personhood, of a subject built up of traits set against a universal backdrop of likeness and difference. In its place, to invert the old Durkheimian telos, arise collectivities erected on a form of mechanical solidarity in which me is generalized into we.

In this vocabulary, it is not just that the personal is political. The personal is the only politics there is, the only politics with a tangible referent or emotioanl valence. By extension, interpersonal relations - above all, sexuality, from the peccadillos of presidents to the global specter of AIDS - come to stand, metonymically, for the incoate forces that threaten the world as we know it. It is in these privatized terms that action is organized, that the experience of inequity and antagonism takes meaningful shape.

- (from) John and Jean Comaroff, 2000 Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming. Public Culture 12(2):291.